The Visual in Botany

Abstract

One of my favorite writers on biology is a woman who never held a professional position, but who was third woman to be elected a Fellow of Royal Society, Britain's premiere science society. Her name is Agnes Arber (1878-1960) and she was a specialist in plant morphology, particularly of monocots. But book of hers that I most enjoyed is The Mind and Eye (1954), a study on biological inquiry that ranges far from her specialty. In it, she argues for importance of observation to biologist; and like psychologist of art, Rudolph Arnheim (1966), she sees functions of perception and thought of eye and mind, so intertwined as to be impossible to separate. Arber also sees art and biology as interconnected, since in both fields thoughtful perception can be key to creativity. Though in this book Arber draws her examples from many areas of biology besides botany, I'm not sure that it could have been written by anyone but a botanist. I think it is in botany perhaps more than in any other area of biology that visual and artistic are essential to development of discipline. In a book on natural history illustrations in British Library, Ray Desmond (1986) argues that foundations of modem botany were laid by artist rather than by scientist. He quotes 17th-century botanist John Ray as observing that a history of plants without figures is like a geography book without maps. Agnes Arber was acutely aware of importance of visual to botany. Her scientific papers and her monographs are full of illustrations, most of which she created herself. Her father was an artist and began giving her drawing lessons when she was eight years old. She developed an interest in botany while in her teens. It was quite natural for her to combine her two interests, and she continued to combine them throughout her life. Early in her career, these interests led her to write a history of herbals (Arber 1912, revised in 1938), and later to write of Goethe's interest in botany (1946). It was Goethe who observed that you really do not see a plant until you draw it. Because I like Arber's clear and opinionated writing style and enjoyed The Mind and Eye so much, I recently read her book on herbals which led me to other works on plant illustration. This has been a very pleasant experience because many of these books have beautiful reproductions of work of artists and artist/botanists who have advanced science of botany while at same time creating things of beauty. This experience has also made me more convinced than ever of Bernard McTigue's (1989) observation that if C.P. Snow had known something about history of botany he might have modified his ideas on two cultures because the history of botany is also to a certain extent history of art, one in which progress in systematic exploration of natural is matched by advance in quality of means used to represent that world (p. 50).